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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem

Robert Smithson

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Robert Smithson
Age: 35 †
Born: 1938
Born: January 2
Died: 1973
Died: July 20
Art Theorist
Artist
Conceptual Artist
Draftsperson
Drawer
Geologist
Land Artist
Painter
Photographer
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Passaic
New Jersey
Robert I. Smithson
Problem
Proven
Mean
Mistakes
Artists
Dead
Mistake
Often
Artist
Ends

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Nature is never finished.
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Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control
Robert Smithson
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
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When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
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Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
Robert Smithson